Peter and Dan Snow: father and son duo to return with The World's Greatest Battlefields. Photograph: BBC

The father and son duo of Peter and Dan Snow are to return with a global take on their BBC2 series, Battlefield Britain.

Production work has just begun on a new eight-part series called The World's Greatest Battlefields, which will air in 2007 - three years after the pair made their co-presenting debut with Battlefield Britain.

In the new series, the Snows will examine eight battles from the 20th century in hour-long programmes using computer graphics and reconstructions to evoke the feel of various conflicts.

Their chosen conflicts are the Battle of Amiens, which led to the end of the first world war in 1918, and two encounters that helped turn the course of the second world war in the allies' favour - the Battle of Midway in the Pacific between the US and Japan in 1942 and the ferocious fight between the Nazis and the Red Army in Stalingrad between 1942 and 1943.

The other battles include the 1951 communist spring offensive in Korea, the Tet offensive in Vietnam in 1968 and the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Two more recent conflicts, the Falklands war of 1982 and the 1991 Gulf war - during which Snow senior memorably used a sandpit on Newsnight to illustrate military tactics - will complete the series.

In Battlefield Britain, Peter Snow handled the analysis, leaving his son to undertake more strenuous tasks such as cycling through a bog to highlight the difficulties facing the opposing sides in the Battle of the Boyne, and flying in a light aircraft to get an idea of what the Battle of Britain was like for fighter pilots.

The Snows are returning to BBC2 despite the fact that Battlefield Britain divided critics when first shown in 2004.

Thomas Sutcliffe wrote in the Independent that the series was "depressing in its craven capitulation to the glamour of technology".

"Events of the first century were presented through the idiom of the 21st: satellite maps and bleeping computer screens and CCTV footage, visual clichés that are now getting very flabby and exhausted.

"There was a belief that contemporary actors play-acting were better at representing the emotional component of history than the people who experienced it and recorded what they felt. The history here was described passionately, but it was described in a fundamentally anti-historical way.

However, Rupert Smith said in the Guardian that Battlefield Britain "was unpretentious stuff that understood that, when it comes to history, a cute smile and a fancy graphics package are more interesting than taxes and axes".

Dan Snow said of the new commission: "For me, this series is a great opportunity to study the greatest battles of the 20th century and chart the effect that they have had on the world we live in today."

The commission from the BBC's factual and learning department came under the aegis of the head of documentaries, Alan Hayling, who resigned last week. The Snows will now have to impress a new boss - Sarah Hargreaves - who was confirmed as the head of BBC documentaries and specialist features on Monday.